I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife who was very smart about poetry.

I was excited by what my painter friends were doing and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too and that was a wonderful little fizzy sort of world.

I love painting and music of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.

As for political poetry as it's usually defined it seems there's very little good political poetry.

Poetry especially traditional Iranian poetry is very good at looking at things from a number of different angles simultaneously.

I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

So I suppose poetry language the shaping of it was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.

Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can't be related to other forms of historical poetry.

I used to write sonnets and various things and moved from there into writing prose which incidentally is a lot more interesting than poetry including the rhythms of prose.